Logo

NORTH BERGEN, N.J. — In deepest urban New Jersey, just off the hellish Routes 1 and 9, past the Lincoln Tunnel Motel and the Hoboken cemetery, sits an unlikely place that might be thought of as opera heaven. Or maybe opera purgatory, a cavernous building where hundreds of pieces of faux-ormolu-encrusted furniture, brass goblets, rubber plants and costumes — rack after elegant rack — end up when not in use in productions by New York City Opera, awaiting their next night on the stage.
But for many of the costumes, the ones in odd sizes or past their prime, the wait is in vain, their requiems sung. And that is where E. V. Day comes in.

Over the last several months, while the opera has been preparing to begin its new season after extensive renovations to its home at Lincoln Center, the David H. Koch Theater, Ms. Day has been given free rein to rummage through its considerable closets. An artist best known for transforming clothing into sculpture material — deconstructed dresses arrested in the act of exploding, frighteningly dissected wetsuits, G-strings arrayed in fighter-jet formations — Ms. Day, 42, has described her work as “futurist abstract paintings in three dimensions,” and as a means of examining social constructs, particularly the roles that clothes can impose on women.